Thursday, 23 February 2017

On DVD: "I, Daniel Blake"

Back in May, it looked a lot like the summer of Ken Loach. The Palme d’Or victory was
closely followed by the release of career retrospective Versus and the
rerelease of 1967’s Poor Cow, titles that spoke to a lifelong commitment to
championing social change. Thereafter, the quiet man of British cinema was
rather drowned out: the angry Right sounded a huffy retreat from Europe,
setting the liberal-left into noisy infighting. I, Daniel Blake – for which Loach won that Cannes prize – now
reappears as a rallying flag: a salutary reminder of what so many are facing
today.

You could
call it I, Josef K, such is the bureaucracy in which the eponymous Dan(Dave Johns), a Newcastle carpenter
recovering from a heart attack, finds himself entangled. He’s not fit for work,
yet the State has him three points shy of the threshold required to claim
health benefits; Jobseekers’ Allowance has him looking for gigs he hasn’t the
stamina to take on. Crucially, he’s not a scrounger: rather an ordinary bloke
with skill and evident civic pride, obliged to jump through hoops for a handful
of coins, and made to feel like an abject failure for doing so.

That Loach
and his regular writing collaborator Paul Laverty should care to dramatise a
sinking feeling millions – including, at points, this reviewer – have known all
too well makes I, Daniel Blake an important film, yet it’s not a flawless one:
Dan himself might find the joisting a little rough-hewn in places, though its
makers would doubtless point to this as proof of the finished product’s
authenticity.

Some of the
non-pros drafted in as supporting players can seem wobbly, and while Johns,
Loach’s latest recruit from the stand-up circuit, looks canny enough to know
how to insulate a home using bubblewrap, you sense him nervily feeling his way
into this new performance arena. There’s a marked contrast with fellow debutant
Hayley Squires, who grabs the screen from the very first moment we see her
relocated single mother Katie kicking off bigtime in the jobcentre.

More often
than not, though, these scenes from the class struggle explode into life of one
form or another. Loach and Laverty have an unfailing knack of imbuing their
creations with dignity, pride and a humour that varies from bolshy to wounded,
depending on the circumstances: to a neighbour who’s spotted him moving
cardboard boxes out of his less-than-palatial flat, Dan quips “I’m off to the
Bahamas.” (Byker is as far as he gets.)

The effect is
to draw us further into this social stratum, and deeper down into the
characters’ plight. For the first time, a filmmaker takes us inside the
much-reported food banks, and inspecting their doomy
nuclear-bunker-meets-church-social ambiance, we’re left wondering how it is
we’ve been brought so low (guzzling baked beans direct from the tin) so
quickly. Then again, the options opening up for these characters in the outside
world – crime, prostitution, alcoholism – are flatly terrible.

Pointedly,
cinematographer Robbie Ryan has none of the freedom he was granted in the
recent American Honey, set instead to describing the neutral-grey tones of the
bureaucratic drablands Dan and Katie struggle within. Yet certain other formal
choices underline that we’re watching a master at work, one who knows exactly
what this story represents: one brilliant, tragicomic cut from a careers
advisor’s big spiel on smartphone CVs to Dan’s uncompromising expression is
eloquent indeed on how the labour market has changed, and not necessarily for
the better.

At every
turn, Loach’s humanism – his total commitment to the specifics of the
situations his characters find themselves in – transcends all other political
labels. Whether you’re to the left or right of Jeremy Corbyn, whether you voted
Leave or Remain (and it’s just possible Dan, like many across the depressed
North-East, voted to go), here is a film that sets out, very starkly, what 99%
of us are now up against. Rally around it and get angry (angrier?), because the
alternative – resigning ourselves to dying in the streets like dogs – is, even
for this moment in time, too awful to contemplate.

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About Me

Mike was born in Warwickshire in 1978. He has written on film for The Scotsman since 2002, for The Telegraph since 2003, for The Guardian since 2012, and for the Reader's Digest since 2016. In the intervening years, he has appeared on Radio 4's "Today" programme and - with a degree of randomness befitting the man - BBC2's "Working Lunch". He has also contributed to the home-viewing reference guide "The DVD Stack" (Canongate, 2006; second edition 2007) and Halliwell's "The Movies That Matter" (HarperCollins, 2008).